f every telegraph instrument--is essential
to it, and is the foundation of the entire electrical art. Let it be
added to this great scientist's credit that he never sought to patent
any of his inventions, giving them, as Franklin had done, free to all
the world.

The struggle which Morse made to perfect and secure public recognition
of his telegraph and the injustice shown Eli Whitney by the people of
the South, were as nothing when compared with the trials of that most
unfortunate of all inventors, Charles Goodyear, whose story is one of
the most tragic in American annals. No one can read of his struggles
without experiencing the deepest admiration for a man who, at the time,
was regarded as a hopeless lunatic.

Charles Goodyear was born at New Haven, Connecticut, in 1800. While he
was still a child, his father moved to Philadelphia and engaged in the
hardware business, in which his son joined him, as soon as he was old
enough to do so. But the panic of 1836 wiped the business out of
existence, and Goodyear was forced to look around for some other means
of livelihood. He had been interested for some time in the wonderful
success of some newly-established India-rubber companies, and, out of
curiosity, bought an India-rubber life-preserver. Upon examining it, he
found a defect in the valve, and inventing an improvement in it, he went
to New York with the intention of selling his improvement to the
manufacturer. The manufacturer was impressed with the new device, but
told Goodyear frankly that the whole India-rubber business of the
country was on the verge of collapse, and indeed, the collapse came a
few months later.

The trouble was that the goods which the rubber companies had been
turning out were not durable. The use of rubber had begun about fifteen
years before, first in France in the manufacture of garters and
suspenders, and then in England where a manufacturer named Mackintosh
made water-proof coats by spreading a layer of rubber between two layers
of cloth. Then, in 1833, the Roxbury India-Rubber Company was organized
in the United States, and manufactured an India-rubber cloth from which
wagon-covers, caps, coats, and other articles were made. Its success was
so great that other companies were organized and seemed on the highroad
to fortune, when a sudden reverse came. For the heat of summer melted
wagon-covers, caps and coats to sticky masses with an odor so offensive
that they had to be buried. So the bus